


All That Glitters

by kerlin



Category: Ever After (1998)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-30
Updated: 2010-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-11 08:50:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I hear it's a lovely city. I wonder what it looks like by firelight?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That Glitters

He found her sitting on the staircase, elbows resting on splayed knees, chin burrowed in her cupped hands. It was a cold, rainy day and she would have been better to take refuge in front of a fire. He told her so, and was taken aback when the face she lifted was tear-stained.

"Danielle," was all he could say, the simple name escaping him in his surprise. He cast a guilty look over his shoulder, but the ever-present guard had either missed his slip or chosen not to take notice of it. "Your Highness."

She laughed, a quick, hysterical sound that escaped her lips. Her hand moved to her mouth quickly, fingers plying the lips and keeping them shut, and her brow creased in something that might have been pain.

He sat beside her, no grace in his movements - there never had been. Always the gawky, bony boy, all angles and lines and awkwardness. "Talk to me."

Danielle, Princess of France and Queen-in-Waiting, shook her head mutely, fingers still pressed against her lips as if she was afraid another choking laugh would escape.

"_Danielle_." This time there was no correction of his address, and he wrapped his hand around her upper arm, the stiff, brocaded fabric scratching at his skin. He shook her slightly, hoping to snap her out of whatever this was. He would rather have an angry Danielle than a silent one. Silent Danielle was terrifyingly unnatural.

He looked up at the guard who stared back impassively, and held onto Danielle's arm more tightly. The fabric gave easily, and he was shocked to feel how thin her arm was in his grip, the bone bird-thin and the flesh nearly gone. Her face, too, was pale and more lined than he had ever seen it.

"Come on." He was pushing his luck much too far to be handling the wife of the Dauphin in this way, but he could still remember when the woman beside him had been a girl scrubbing mud into his hair. Memories like that didn't leave one with the properly respectful attitude toward one's royalty.

She moved with him easily as they climbed the stairs, and he had an idea why she had chosen this place for her refuge. Brilliant in its simplicity, the double staircase at Chambord was a tangible, physical reminder of the man who had passed through their lives and changed it forever in a way that his crypt at Amboise would never be.

He could hear the scuff of boots behind him as the guard climbed the stairs a few feet behind them, and he gambled.

Up to the next level and then out and around and down, Danielle following complacently as he grew more and more worried. Down one level, out, and then up again. By the time the shadowing guard had realized that he had gone down the other staircase, they were already on the original staircase and there was no way he could track them - it was impossible to see someone ascending or descending via the other set of stairs. An architectural stroke of genius that never failed to amaze him when he considered it, but right now he had far greater puzzles.

Like his oldest friend following him passively as he shouldered the door to her antechamber open.

It was empty; she'd never been one to force her servants to wait around all day on the whim that she might return to her rooms. He sat her down on a carved mahogany and velvet chair and turned the key in the lock of the door to be sure.

She was still sitting where he had left her, head slumped as she stared at a spot in the rushes of the floor. He knelt at her feet in those rushes, replacing the spot with his face as he looked up at her pleadingly.

"Tell me what's wrong, Danielle. I want to help."

"Gustav?" She looked at him curiously, and raised her hand to cup his face in a tender manner that she never used with him. A warm smile spread across her face and he sighed in relief. "Gustav." More sure of herself, now. "My oldest friend."

"Yes," he replied, unsure of what else she wanted him to say, trying to make his answer encouraging.

A shuddering sigh passed through her. "Have you ever been to La Rochelle, Gustav?"

He blinked, confused. "I - no, I haven't. Why do you ask?"

"I hear it's a lovely city," she said, wistfully, and stood. He hoped she might go to the fire - her hand had been icy cold - but instead she went to stand by the window, looking out on the acres of forest that surrounded the château. She wrapped her arms around herself tightly but didn't shiver, didn't move. He watched, stunned, as the weak midwinter light glinted in the wetness of tears on her cheeks. "It's a port, you know. Ships from all over the world coming and going."

He opened his mouth but realized he had no idea what to say. At least she was talking again, even if she was frightening him.

"I wonder what it looks like by firelight?" she whispered, the last word catching in her throat. She tried to clutch herself more tightly around herself and he came up behind her and touched her thin hand, cold and nearly translucent. He rememberd when it had been rough and dark, remembered how it had felt around his own when she pulled him along after her.

She turned into him, catching him by surprise, burying her face in his neck and clutching tightly at the fabric of his sleeves.

"I hear them screaming at night, Gustav." The words were nearly inaudible, mumbled against his skin, and he swallowed hard, feeling her lips against the skin at his throat. "I hear them screaming, and begging for their lives."

He encircled her frail body in his arms, lacing his fingers through her long har and resting his cheek on the top of her head.

"I hardly know him anymore," she murmured, and her hands fisted, catching some of the skin of his arms, but he didn't cry out. "We were supposed to live happily ever after." She leaned back in his arms, tilting her head up to meet his eyes. "Sometimes I feel I've died in the fires too."

With a swiftness that stunned him, he hated Henry with every fiber of his being. He had destroyed her - his beautiful, wild, brilliant Princess had been sacrificed to a religious fanaticism that only grew as Francis aged and the Dauphin moved closer to the throne he had once professed to disdain.

Her lips tasted of tears, and his mind registered that taste before it registered that he was kissing her - before it registered that she was kissing him back with a hunger born of desperation and pain. His hands untangled from her hair and moved up to frame her face, fingers splayed out against her sharp cheekbones and hollowed cheeks.

They had been here before, but last time there had been dirt under his fingernails and soot smudged through her hair, and the kiss had been an exploration, a childish whim that she had never taken seriously. There had been tentative experimentation, straw sticking to bare, sweaty, skin and horses shifting restlessly below.

That was a world away from her pale, thin face and embroidered velvet gown, his silk breeches and paint-smudged tunic. He pulled them apart, falling backwards to brace himself against the cold stone of the narrow window slot, breathing heavily.

She looked at him from beneath shadowed eyes and she smiled wanly. "Go, Gustav."

He swallowed, hard, and he could still taste her on his lips when he licked them. He wanted to say something, wanted to tell her that she was still alive and that Henry would return from La Rochelle and come to her. But her charming prince would return with blood on his hands, innocent blood, and being alive was, in the end, a matter better left to semantics.

"_Go._"

He turned and left.

**Author's Note:**

> The historical Henry II of France went off the deep end in his persecution of French Protestants (called Huguenots). Two Huguenots were burned at the stake at La Rochelle (a port city on the English Channel) during his reign, and his grandson and great-grandson sacked and burned the city.


End file.
